This guest article was written by Daniel Shain from LaptopLogic.com - the best place to read about new laptop hardware and check out the latest laptop news.
If you're a frequent visitor to oled-info.com, chances are you know something about OLEDs. Just to name a few of their best traits, they’re thin, lightweight, environmentally friendly, potentially flexible, and they produce high quality color. You can find out more about OLEDs in oled-info’s introduction. Although it looks like OLEDs are the displays of the future, what about the displays of today? LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) technology has taken great strides since its inception, and it’s worth taking a look back to see how far we’ve come.
When LCDs first hit the scene in the early 80s they were small, black and white, and heavy, not even achieving color until 1993. Since then, the technology has been improving rapidly. In the early nineties most notebooks used a slower passive matrix LCD that could not keep up with fast moving images, but standard LCDs today use a much faster active matrix TFT-LCD (active matrix TFT technology is also used in the new AMOLED displays). LCDs have become thinner, lighter, and brighter as the years have gone by, and the technology has become so common that many people even have a secondary larger LCD screen for their LCD equipped laptops.
One of the major areas of modern LCD improvement has been in backlighting. Traditional LCDs use CCFL (Cold Cathode Florescent Lamp) backlighting, but these are bulky and consume a lot of power. LED technology has recently improved to the point where LED backlit LCDs are becoming more and more common. LED backlit LCDs produce more light with less energy and can be very thin, making the laptop display simultaneously more useful for seeing color accurately and more mobile (not to mention saving battery life). LEDs are also solid state components, making them less vulnerable to shock than florescent lighting, and they are more environmentally friendly since they lack toxic mercury.
Another recent LCD innovation is the transflective LCD. Transflective (transmissive + reflective) displays can have an illuminance sensor which makes them aware of the ambient light around them. When in low lighting, the transmissive backlight is enabled like a normal laptop screen. When there is ample light, the backlight is disabled and the display acts mainly as a reflective display. This allows the use of a laptop or other device outdoors without glare or battery-wasting backlighting.
Although OLED displays will outshine LCDs in time, LCDs are quite capable displays and currently much cheaper than their new organic cousins. How much development and innovation continues in LCD technology will determine if it becomes a true competitor for OLED displays, or if it will go the way of other forgotten display giants like the CRT.
